The imaginary island nation of Rustland is a Marxist dictatorship in the Caribbean with a people yearning to be free and a military with obsolete, but still lethal, Soviet-era warships and planes.

Sound familiar?

For the past two weeks, U.S. Navy officers have been using Port Everglades as a war-games base to determine how best to protect the scores of merchant ships and cruise liners using Florida ports. On Tuesday, they would only grin when asked whether Rustland is a thinly veiled representation of Cuba.

``It's just somewhere in the Caribbean, south of Haiti,'' said Lt. Cmdr. Jeff Motter, officer in charge of the 13-member team working in the operation with the navies of eight Latin American nations and South Africa. ``They've been mining some straits and choke points, and there's been some torpedo action. It's very Cold War.''

Motter says the exercise, which ends Friday, is being directed by a Brazilian navy officer in Rio de Janeiro. In a real crisis, he said, merchant ships would be required to radio ahead to teams like his with their course and speed so that they could be advised whether their route was clear of mines, submarines and other threats.

During the exercise, the Port Everglades team has been responsible for the security of shipping in a huge rectangle extending from Florida to Cuba's north coast and east to the mid-Atlantic. A second U.S. team, based in San Juan, has been handling the Caribbean south of Cuba down to the coast of Venezuela.

The other navies are responsible for blocks of ocean extending from their coastlines into the Atlantic and Pacific. Besides Brazil, they include Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela. Paraguay, which is landlocked, also is involved, but it was unclear in what capacity.

The last time the teams, made up of Navy reservists, were activated for an actual crisis was during the Gulf War when their job was to ensure the safety of oil tankers entering Kuwaiti waters. They also were activated during the invasion of Grenada in 1985.

Rustland, according to the war-games scenario, has been ruled since 1965 by ``a Marxist dictator generalissimo'' who had ``received substantial aid from the Warsaw Pact until the late 1980s,'' after which the island's economy collapsed.

It has the dictator fleeing after a failed attempt to seize a neighboring nation's oil fields. Rustland's people rebel, but the generalissimo's subordinates put down the uprising and replace him with a new strongman.